Techniques for instantiating an application in a virtualized environment are well known in the art. Such an application may be instantiated on a virtualization server and a counterpart remoted application may be rendered on a user's computing device, such as a mobile phone, smartphone, tablet, laptop, personal computer, or other electronic device. Communication between the virtualization server and the user's computing device may be facilitated using a remote presentation protocol, such as the Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) protocol and HDX protocol developed by Citrix Systems, Inc. of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., or the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) manufactured by the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.
In some circumstances, the aforementioned application may display multimedia content, such as video or audio. Techniques for media redirection may be used to facilitate rendering of the multimedia content at the remoted application. For example, some implementations of HDX MediaStream Flash redirection moves the processing of ADOBE Flash content from MICROSOFT Internet Explorer on a virtualization server to a user's device. By moving the processing to the user's device, media redirection may reduce server and network load, resulting in greater scalability while ensuring a high definition user experience. Similarly, Aero redirection may allow the WINDOWS Aero interface to be used on remote desktops/applications. Likewise, Windows Media redirection may be used to remote a windows media file. In more recent times, HTML5 video streaming has become implemented in some web browser applications. As a result, some developers started using HTML5 for media players, instead of legacy media players. Legacy media players were commonly implemented as external plug-ins: Apple's Quicktime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and Adobe Flash. HTML5 includes tags that some believe will render external plug-ins obsolete.
There remain numerous drawbacks and limitations in the prior art as it relates to multimedia redirection in a virtualized environment.